WASHINGTON, D.C. — The younger generation is the key to a strong Israel, said Natan Sharansky last week at the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly in Washington, D.C.
Sharansky, a human rights activist from the former Soviet Union and the chairman of the executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel, spoke to a crowd of around 3,000 people about the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“The battle which we are facing today is the battle for our identity,” he said. “Today Israel is strong, but … our aim must be to connect every young Jew with Israel and to connect Israel with every Jewish community in the world.”
While fighting for human rights and freedom in the Soviet Union, Sharansky was often asked to choose between universalism and nationalism, he said.
“Are you fighting for the human rights of all the world or for the rights of your people?… In fact, I never felt that I had to decide, not only because I enjoyed both of these values, but because I always felt, I believed, that these two struggles were connected,” he said. “The struggle for freedom and identity is the same struggle.”
After the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sharansky believes that Jews are now being asked the same question.
“Today we live in the global, post-national, post-modern, post-identity world where people… again are asked to make a choice between universalism and nationalism. Between freedom and identity,” he said. “If we insist on being part of a Jewish state, doesn’t it make a mockery of our larger Jewish ideals?… Do we really want to [place] ourselves in a Jewish cocoon of a state?”
These questions, said Sharansky, lead to assimilation and the erosion of Jewish identity.
“And then the most awful thing happens, a young Jew… finally says, ‘Enough. I want to live in the world without Israel.’”
The key, he told the audience, which was made up of Jewish groups from throughout North America, is to build strong Jewish communities around the world.
